Reading Response Assignment

Reading Response Assignment
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Plot
Miriam Cooke in Women and the war story focuses on the role of Arab women in wars, by synthesizing different narratives into a war story. Cooke challenges notions about war, highlighting on the positive contribution of women and quest for peace. Even with women as civilians during wars, they are still important players, as illustrated by the author mentioning of war accounts by Arab female writer. In other words women voices have changed the prevailing notions about war, and there is a need to acknowledge their contributions.
Theme
Cooke suggests that Arab women have played a more prominent role in wars meant to liberate than has been acknowledged. As such, the main theme is to set straight that Arab women played a central role in various wars rather than a peripheral role. The Algerian War of independence illustrates this notion, where women combatants fought against the French, but were then suppressed after the French left. The conventional stories about war with male combatants as the heroes, fails to take into account the role of women in fighting or advocating for peaceful means to end conflicts. This goes against the narrative where men are the ones who fight in order to protect women. There is now recognition that women played major roles in the Gulf War, Iraq-Iran war, Palestine-Israeli conflicts and postcolonial wars. Arab women writers have been crucial to show the emancipation of women by highlighting on their changing roles in the society.
Women have been given minor role in power, politics and war and it is no surprise that their participation in wars is trivialized. Even though , there is no one war story to capture the experiences of Arab women, literature on war history by the Lebanese, Iraq...